Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was born on the fourth of April 1937 — some sources say 1938 — at Fairfax, South Carolina, in the Gullah-Geechee lowcountry, and carried north to Philadelphia as a child of the Great Migration. At nineteen, in February 1958, she sailed for Paris to live the bohemian life, and came home by way of everywhere.

In New York she spent some three years with Sun Ra's Arkestra — chanting, dancing, designing and sewing the costumes, cooking for the band, styling herself a space goddess — and moved in the Umbra and Black Arts orbit of the Lower East Side. Then in 1970 came the book: Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl — a memoir set with recipes that refused all measuring cups, because "I cook by vibration" — a landmark of Black American food writing that has never left print. Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off followed in 1972.

For more than three decades, from about 1980 to 2013, her voice lived on NPR — hundreds of commentaries, the program Horizons, and the holiday food specials Seasonings, which took the 1996 James Beard Award; she was a principal writer on the Peabody-honored series Will the Circle Be Unbroken?. Television gave her The Americas' Family Kitchen on PBS and its companion cookbooks; the movies gave her to Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Jonathan Demme's Beloved. She called herself a culinary anthropologist and a culinary griot, and the trade she pioneered now answers to those names.

She died on the third of September 2016 at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, in the Bronx, at seventy-nine. Honored be Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who seasoned by feel and fed a people their own story.